Monday, October 12, 2009

Updated Album

In an attempt to not fall too far behind on recording my experiments, I finished editing and uploading the last pics to my first Picassa Web album ("First attempts"). All these pics are still from my first roll and a half of film on which I knew very little about photography, let alone anything about my specific camera.
I am excited about the last few rolls that I have developed and am hoping that I'll need to do less and less editing with photoshop as I learn more. I will create a new album for my second roll of film and update as soon as possible.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

First Attempts

When I first found my treasure at a garage sale, it had film still in it. The film was lord-only-knows how old, and it was a low quality asa 100 film. I didn't have great expectations from that roll, only to discover if the the camera actually worked or not. I was pretty excited when I got the first roll back and there were actual pictures on there! The quality was really poor and spent hours pouring over them on my computer trying to get the right contrast, to get some decent colour out of them. I managed to salvage a few that have some interest.
For my second roll of film, I was sure to buy a higher quality asa 400 film, but I still knew nothing about photography! So Jeffrey and I went on a photographic adventure to figure out just what my new toy could do with some decent film in it. J, who also has an old film camera, gave me a few tips about adjusting shutter speed for light levels, but we didn't really know the right adjustments for my particular camera.
I learned a lot from the roll of film, namely that I need to set my shutter speed higher than J would with his camera, as a lot of my pictures came back washed out. Also, with the lens that is on my camera it is a lot more difficult to take interesting pictures of larger landscapes (i.e. it captures objects close-up much better than far away). Also I found that my Olympus Pen F can capture amazing colour, but it doesn't fair well on white or light backgrounds. (On my next roll I have started to learn about and experiment with apature to try to correct some of this, but that is for a later entry).
Overall, my first roll and a half of film still required some help from the computer after developing to really get quality photos but there was some progress.

** I have created a Picasa Web Album to support this blog since it will allow me to create albums and hold more pictures. I have added a slideshow on the left side of the blog with those pictures, but you can check out all my pics and view them out in more detail on that site (click on the slideshow to be automatically directed to my Picasa Albums).